Zen and Vega: Ryzen PRO Mobile

In the second half of last year, AMD’s Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom division (now the Enterprise and Embedded division) launched its Ryzen PRO family of desktop processors, for business customers that needed additional management capabilities. AMD has been making ‘Pro’ versions of its consumer processors for several generations now, usually mimicking the specifications of the consumer products aside from the management support.

These products, by and large, go up against Intel’s equivalent vPro processors, and AMD’s value add revolves around support for DASH, an open-source management protocol, TSME (transparent secure memory encryption), and its commitment to customer requests such as operating system image stability (18-months), guaranteed processor availability (24-months), manufacturing specifications designed for long-term reliability, and a commercial limited warranty (36-months). AMD also likes to tout that it offers a Pro product at the lower end of the market, where Intel does not have a vPro-enabled Core i3.

As part of the AMD Tech Day, it was announced that the Ryzen PRO Mobile family will be launched in Spring 2018. These components are, by and large, the Ryzen Mobile family of processors with Vega graphics but with the added Pro features listed above. For performance and power, AMD states similar sorts of numbers as it did with the launch of Ryzen Mobile: up to 270% better performance per watt, targeting 13 hours of useful battery life, 9 hours of HD video playback, and targeting a generation of sleek and powerful laptops, in this case focused for the Enterprise market.

So much like the Ryzen 7 2700U, the Ryzen 5 2500U, and the Ryzen 3 2300U, AMD will launch the Ryzen PRO Mobile equivalents:

We are likely to see OEMs that currently provide AMD A-Series PRO notebooks to offer updated versions with these new processors, as well as a series of new designs coming into the business and enterprise market.

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Hey everyone, thanks for coming to read about AMD's roadmaps. I want to go into a lot more detail on what came out of AMD's Tech Day, particularly about APUs, 12nm, 7nm, Vega, new APU pricing, the X470 chipset and so on, but a pretty bad strain of CES flu is doing the rounds and this year I'm an unlucky recipient. It's not completely debilitating, but bad enough for me to lose concentration that I might have to cancel a few meetings at the show tomorrow as a result if I can't string a coherent thought together.

Rather than post a garbled mess, I want to get around to detailing the news for you all properly, as there's a lot of nuances to go into. We also had an interview with Dr. Lisa Su about AMD in 2018. Stay tuned for updates over the next couple of weeks, as I stay hydrated and call room service for chicken soup!Reply

AMD has one die design covering the whole of Ryzen Desktop + Threadripper + EPYC, and one die design covering Ryzen Mobile + Ryzen APUs. They're not going to spend a third amount of money on masks for a single low-end dual-core die with a few CUs unless it was going to expand into a new segment of products. Given that AMD has been quite open about its 2018 roadmap today, I doubt that would happen.Reply

Well there is a 2 core / 3 CUs design on the roadmap - Banded Kestrel. This is however intended for embedded. Although it is rather similar to the Bristol Ridge / Stoney Ridge split, and the latter also showed up in non-embedded markets.However, just like Stoney Ridge, Banded Kestrel will be limited to single-channel memory. I always assumed it's going to show up in cheap notebooks/PCs, basically as a Pentium Silver competitor, but of course I could be wrong (in any case, it's not ready yet).Reply

Most of us who sit in front of computers all day aren't getting enough vitamin D. Vitamin D plays a major regulatory role in our immune systems. Since realizing I was deficient in vitamin D a few years ago (your doctor can easily test for this), I've been supplementing it, and getting sick far less often as a result.Reply

Yep, I used to get sick often, like 3-4 times a year. But since I started supplementing with Vitamin D3 plus sunlight whenever I can, and large doses of probiotics (yogurt ain't enough) and some others like vit C, zinc, copper, elderberry, etc everyday, I never got sick even when everyone around me was. As in literally, not one day with the flu or cold, and without cold/flu vaccines either.

The last time I was sick, and before my current supplementation, my D3 level was 16 ng/mL and that was despite a multivitamin which had some vit D in it. I made sure to bring it up to 45 ng/mL.

Yeah I also have to supplement vitamin D. I get enough of the other stuff from my multi most of the time, although when I feel something coming on, extra vitamin C and zinc helps. Elderberry is also good, as is Echinacea (I prefer it in tea form myself). Garlic too... I toss some in my chicken soup.Reply